You know Cory Doctorow, and perhaps you’re following him on social media, or you’re following his blog. I do. Today, he’s commenting on how the Digital Milenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been used to develop Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) which is being used to take away the rights you used to have by abusing section 1201 which it a felony to help people tamper with “access controls” that restrict copyrighted works.
Importantly, it doesn’t matter how simplistic the access control is. No matter how simple it is, if you enable people to tamper with it, you are committing a felony. Doctorow gives a few examples, and you probably experienced some yourself. I liked this one:
DMCA 1201 is how Apple and John Deere make it a felony for anyone except them to fix their products. They just design their devices so that after the repair is complete, you need an unlock code to get the system to recognize new parts. Bypassing the unlock code defeats an “access control” and is thus a literal crime.
Copyright is being abused and it needs reform. And not just in the USA: sadly, the US projects so much power both as a state and a collection of corporations, that other countries simply followed suit.
This is why Switzerland has article 39a in it’s copyright act. Paragraph 1 says that “effective technological measures for the protection of works and other protected subject-matter may not be circumvented.”
Paragraph 2 defines what these technical measures might be and paragraph 3 says that it is illegal “to manufacture, import, offer, transfer or otherwise distribute, rent, give for use, and advertise or possess for commercial purposes devices, products or components, or provide services” that enable “the circumvention of effective technological measures”.
Now here’s the kicker: Switzerland limits copyright in specific ways. For example, I can make copies of protected works for myself or my close friends and family. It is my *right* to this, but I can’t get the tools to do this because the tools cannot be given to me, as explained above.
That’s why I hate the copyright industry. These are the laws they have given us. And Switzerland is about to reform it, but not in a good way.
RIAA kills youtube-dl, by Cory Doctorow
Protection of technological measures in the Swiss copyright act
#Copyright #DRM
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“effective technological measures for the protection of works and other protected subject-matter may not be circumvented” — isn’t this a tautology? I mean, if they can be circumvented, then obviously they are not effective?
– deshipu 2020-10-24 21:21 UTC
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Feel free to check the official text in German, French, or Italian.
– Alex Schroeder 2020-10-24 21:27 UTC
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Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money. An interesting article about fintech, unregulated banks, Saudi money, Uber, Prop 22 in California, the gig economy, the 1%, and more.
Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money
– 2020-11-05 22:22 UTC
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When I present my arguments on the subject, the most frequent argument I hear in response is something like the following: “artists have to eat, too”. The answer to this argument is so mind-bogglingly obvious that, in the absence of understanding, it starkly illuminates just how successful capitalism has been in corrupting a broad human understanding of empathy. So, I will spell the answer out: why do we have a system which will, for any reason, deny someone access to food? How unbelievably cruel is a system which will let someone starve because they cannot be productive within the terms of capitalism? – Sustainable creativity in a world without copyright
Sustainable creativity in a world without copyright
– Alex 2021-12-25 21:25 UTC
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Doctorow is still going strong… This time about *Trusting Trust*, Palladium, Secure Computing, and Cosmicstrand:
So it’s a big deal that Kaspersky has detected a UEFI-infecting rootkit (which they’ve dubbed a “bootkit”), which they call Cosmicstrand, which can reinstall itself after your reformat your drive and reinstall your OS … Cosmicstrand does some really clever, technical things to compromise your UEFI, which then allows it to act with near-total impunity and undetectability. – Your computer is tormented by a wicked god, by Cory Doctorow, for Pluralistic
Kaspersky believes that this variant was active in 2020 and that an earlier version saw use between 2016 and mid-2017 and that both were written by Chinese-speaking developers. The command and control servers used by both variants used domain names that remained dormant for long stretches of time, during which the rootkit would be inoperable. Company researchers believe that means that while CosmicStrand was designed to persist permanently on computers, the actual exploitation of those machines may not have lasted for more than a few months. Then again, the researchers said it may have been possible that the domains were periodically reactivated for short durations. – Discovery of new UEFI rootkit exposes an ugly truth: The attacks are invisible to us, by Dan Goodin, for Ars Technica
Your computer is tormented by a wicked god, by Cory Doctorow, for Pluralistic
– Alex 2022-07-28 22:02 UTC
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Oh, and Audible (back to DRM), and how they use ACX to intentionally have malfeasants pose as rights holders, exploit narrators, and force authors to act against narrators again and again, while calmly taking the money of the customers that got fooled (and not reimbursing authors, of course).
From poking around on ACX, it looks like Amazon’s main way of checking whether a user has the rights to a book is by looking in Amazon’s catalog to see if there’s already an audiobook edition. That means that if a writer refuses to sell on Audible because of their DRM policies, Audible will use that boycott as an excuse to let ripoff artists bilk the writer, the narrator and the listeners – because if there’s no Audible edition, they assume that the audio rights must be up for grabs. – Why none of my books are available on Audible, by Cory Doctorow, for Pluralistic
Why none of my books are available on Audible, by Cory Doctorow, for Pluralistic
– Alex 2022-07-28 22:07 UTC